If you are in business for yourself, you undoubtedly understand the concept of sticking to what you know.  Businesses perform best when they fill a particular niche or set of niches.  Odds are you have done hundreds of value analysis trying to understand whether you should make something or buy something.  If your business was to sell cars, would you make the headlights, too?  Odds are the amount of research and QA cycles that goes into reflection angles, brightness, and performing according to certain state laws are above your company and it would be best to purchase headlights from companies that understand these factors best.  Are you a web firm?  Why build your own website in-house when there are others that can do it so much more efficiently?  This post will go into some reasons why you should outsource your website solution.

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Meta tags include a multitude of information about a particular page or web site. Information regarding what the page contains to who made the web page can all be conveyed through Meta tags. More importantly, the most important themes and phrases can be captured into these keywords. This post will go into a little more detail as to the importance of Meta Tags, and why they are more important today than they were 5 years ago.

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Relying on search engines to automatically crawl your website is not the best way to get your pages indexed. You must explicitly tell Google what pages you want it to list to potential visitors! This post will go into some detail and offer some different techniques on how to index your site more completely on Google. These techniques will be applicable to other search engines as well.

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What does this actually mean? Do you print advertisements or marketing pamphlets? Are the filled with text? Probably not, because you know if you picked anything up with 1000 words, you would most likely not read even 10% of it! The same principles flow into web design and content layout.

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AJAX is extremely useful and helps alleviate the load on servers for large-scale application websites. What about for smaller, more concise web applications, though? This post is going to go into some of the great things that I learned regarding AJAX application support for websites, regardless of their size.

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How often do your web people analyze your website for particular keywords? AndPlus Design does a monthly check on all of its customers using FREE webtools that any website owner can use! There are people who stay on top of the search engine spider logic, but, business owners shouldn’t have to.

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Small business owners often do not maximize the potential of a full-time sales tool such as a website. Often, small business owners think that their website is just an online representation of a brochure or static marketing content. I am seeing more and more buzz on the internet with small business owners discussing how their websites are dynamic and what it is doing for their revenue. Having dynamic content on your website allows you to qualify leads, build credibility with potential customers, and always display appropriate information to the correct audience.

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It sounds like a simple idea, doesn’t it? I have a client who had success with their website, and was very happy with the contribution the website was making to his and her company. This particular client had 500+ products that they were selling to customers, and, although they were not at the time taking orders and selling directly from their website, close to 80% of their regular customers did their research on this client’s website.

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There are thousands of web firms in this country all trying to tell you why they are better than the next. The truth of the matter is, First impressions are everything in the world of websites. When putting together your presence on the web, you are going to want an identity which includes your logo, your content, and things that are specific to your business. You are in business because there is a particular niche that you are filling, not because you are the same as every other business out there. Using free templates is a good way to fall through the cracks and show your customers that you are no different than the next company.

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This is the first of a two-part analytics posting. We are going to discuss analyzing the effectiveness of your website through the use of free tools provided by Google. Since these tools are free, they work great for small business owners who do not necessarily have thousands of dollars to pay marketing companies to provide professional analytics. AndPlus Design’s Small Business Website Blog will go into the details of using some of these features.

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